{"id":56540,"date":"2026-03-22T09:48:54","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T13:48:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.info\/?p=56540"},"modified":"2026-03-22T09:49:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T13:49:38","slug":"beware-truth-tellers-the-adl-has-put-a-target-on-all-of-our-backs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.info\/?p=56540","title":{"rendered":"

BEWARE TRUTH-TELLERS!<\/span> The ADL has put a target on all of our backs<\/b><\/span><\/h1>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

by Daniel Sieradski<\/p>\n

For more than a century, the Anti-Defamation League presented itself as a bridge-builder: a Jewish civil rights organization that linked the safety of Jewish communities to universal protections and coalition politics. But a mountain of evidence, including leaked internal audio, former staff testimony, federal lobbying records, court documents, district attorney investigations, and the organization\u2019s own public statements, tell a different story: one of an institution that systematically elevated pro-Israel advocacy over civil liberties, dismissed right-wing threats to curry favor with power, weaponized the concept of antisemitism against Palestinian rights advocates and dissident Jews, and has undermined the very progressive movements it claims as allies.<\/p>\n

That story has now reached its most dangerous chapter. As the United States and Israel wage a war against Iran that the Brennan Center for Justice has called \u201cflatly unconstitutional\u201d\u2014a war most Americans oppose, one Congress did not authorize, and one that has already produced anti-Jewish violence on American soil\u2014the ADL has thrown its full institutional weight behind the bombing campaign. In doing so, it has completed a transformation years in the making: from an organization that once argued Jewish safety depended on the defense of everyone\u2019s civil rights to one that has staked Jewish safety on the foreign policy of the Israeli far right and the goodwill of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

The ADL\u2019s current posture did not begin with Jonathan Greenblatt\u2019s appointment in 2015. In 1993, the San Francisco District Attorney investigated the ADL for collecting confidential information on nearly 10,000 activists and at least 700 organizations\u2014including the United Farm Workers, the NAACP, Greenpeace, and the Center for Constitutional Rights\u2014and for supplying that information to foreign governments, including Israel and apartheid South Africa. The ADL\u2019s infiltrator, Roy Bullock, was a regular volunteer at the San Francisco office of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee at the time its director, Alex Odeh, was murdered by a bomb planted at the office door.<\/p>\n

This history matters because it reveals that the ADL\u2019s current behavior is not an aberration under one CEO. It is the intensification of an institutional pattern: the use of a civil rights brand to legitimize surveillance, repression, and the policing of progressive movements\u2014particularly those that challenge Israeli policy or build solidarity across racial lines.<\/p>\n

What Greenblatt did was strip away the remaining pretense. In December 2015, when Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition with language invoking centuries-old antisemitic stereotypes, the ADL\u2019s response was not condemnation but cover. \u201cWe do not believe that it was Donald Trump\u2019s intention to evoke anti-Semitic stereotypes,\u201d Greenblatt said. Small capitulations calcify. That early accommodation set the tone for what would become the ADL\u2019s defining posture toward right-wing antisemitism: treat it as an error of intent, never a pattern of behavior.<\/p>\n

Soon thereafter, the ADL began to hedge on constitutional rights. A 2021\u00a0Jewish Currents<\/em>\u00a0investigation, based on interviews with eight former employees and federal lobbying records, revealed that in 2016, Greenblatt ordered the civil rights division to \u201cstand down\u201d from opposing the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act\u2014legislation the ADL\u2019s own lawyers had told Congress posed a First Amendment problem. One staff member put it bluntly: \u201cWith all due respect to sex workers, we\u2019re whoring ourselves.\u201d Federal records confirmed that after privately opposing the bill, the ADL lobbied in favor of it. When New York\u2019s governor signed an anti-BDS executive order, the ADL\u2019s own constitutional counsel said it \u201cviolates the First Amendment.\u201d Greenblatt endorsed it anyway. An internal five-year strategic plan listed \u201cLaw Enforcement\u201d and \u201cDelegitimization\u201d (e.g., BDS) as priority initiatives. \u201cCivil rights\u201d did not appear.<\/p>\n

The ideological rupture became explicit in May 2022, when Greenblatt declared that Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and CAIR \u201cepitomize the radical left, the photo inverse of the extreme right,\u201d and announced that \u201canti-Zionism is antisemitism,\u201d reversing a long-standing ADL position that took pains to stress the legitimacy of earnest opposition to Jewish nationalism. In leaked audio obtained by\u00a0Jewish Currents<\/em>, he told dissenting staff, \u201cIf you can\u2019t square the fact that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, then maybe this isn\u2019t the place for you.\u201d In organizations like the ADL, dissent doesn\u2019t end with a bang. It ends with a resignation letter, a quiet lateral move, a decision not to raise one\u2019s hand. What remained after the dissenters left was an institution talking only to itself\u2014unable to distinguish between defending Jews and defending a state.<\/p>\n

Then came October 7, 2023. Hamas launched a devastating attack on southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people at a music festival and in kibbutzim near the Gaza border and taking roughly 250 hostages. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The horror was real, the grief was justified, and the global Jewish community reeled. But here is what must be understood about what followed: October 7 did not create the Jewish establishment\u2019s turn toward authoritarianism. It accelerated it. It gave institutional cover to a transformation that was already well underway.<\/p>\n

Jewish communal politics had undergone a dramatic rightward shift over the prior two decades. What once counted as liberal Zionism\u2014a commitment to peace negotiations, opposition to settlement expansion, and support for Palestinian statehood\u2014was now treated by establishment organizations as functionally indistinguishable from anti-Zionism. Far-right Zionism had been mainstreamed to the point that establishment Jewish institutions had effectively embraced an ethnonationalist vision of Greater Israel. None of this was a grassroots evolution. It was a top-down imposition by a donor class that views Jewish survival exclusively through the lens of ethnonationalism rather than solidarity, justice, or democracy.<\/p>\n

October 7 was the event this establishment had been waiting for\u2014the trauma that would silence every internal critic, justify every authoritarian instinct, and transform every call for Palestinian rights into evidence of genocidal intent. The grief was genuine, and the instrumentalization instantaneous. Within days, the entire Jewish communal establishment locked into a war footing from which it has never stood down: anyone questioning Israel\u2019s response was a Hamas sympathizer; anyone calling for a ceasefire was an antisemite; anyone noting the Israeli government\u2019s own failures was a traitor.<\/p>\n

Central to this lockdown was a narrative of abandonment\u2014the claim that the progressive left had betrayed Jews in their hour of greatest need. There was a kernel of truth to it: some responses to October 7 were callous, and some Jewish progressives did feel genuinely abandoned by allies who could not bring themselves to mourn murdered civilians without immediately pivoting to geopolitical context. That pain was real. But the establishment weaponized that pain with breathtaking speed and cynicism. Figures like William Daroff\u2014a former Republican Jewish Coalition operative who now leads the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations\u2014used the moment to enforce ideological conformity and settle old scores. After Trump\u2019s reelection, rather than seeking unity, Daroff complained that Jews had been cast as \u201coppressors\u201d and blamed marginalized communities for failing to stand by Israel\u2014as though support for the bombardment of Gaza were a prerequisite for showing up at a shiva call. Daroff and his cohort used the narrative of abandonment not to rebuild bridges but to burn the remaining ones: to justify severing ties with civil rights organizations, to attack DEI and intersectionality as inherently antisemitic, and to drive wedges between Jews and every potential ally who might have complicated the establishment\u2019s singular focus on unconditional support for Israel.<\/p>\n

The ADL\u2019s decision to scale back its civil rights work was of a piece with this project\u2014an institution literally dismantling its tools for fighting bigotry in all its forms because the broader mission had become inconvenient to the narrower one. The consensus hardened into something unprecedented in American Jewish life: a complete fusion of Jewish identity, Israeli state interests, and the suppression of dissent, enforced by institutions that claim to represent a community most of whose members never voted for them.<\/p>\n

The ADL\u2019s data practices turned this fusion into policy ammunition.\u00a0The Intercept<\/em>\u00a0obtained the raw dataset behind the ADL\u2019s post-October 7 map of \u201cAntisemitic Incidents and Anti-Israel Rallies.\u201d Of 1,163 entries, 54 percent were Palestine solidarity protests\u2014not acts of hate. The ADL confirmed that a Jewish Voice for Peace sit-in at Grand Central Station, attended by roughly 4,000 people, including rabbis, was included in the antisemitism database\u2014while Greenblatt simultaneously called JVP and IfNotNow \u201chate groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dump protests and pogroms into the same dataset, and you produce a chart that looks like a tsunami of Jew-hatred\u2014a chart lawmakers cite, university administrators fear, and no one outside a handful of investigative reporters will disaggregate. Every time the ADL cried antisemitism at a peace rally, it drained the word of its power to describe the real thing. Brick by brick, the ADL built a world in which actual antisemites could hide behind the charge\u2019s devaluation. That same month, it urged nearly 200 university presidents to \u201cimmediately investigate\u201d SJP chapters for potential terrorism violations carrying up to 20 years in prison\u2014citing Instagram stories as evidence. Asked for a factual basis, an ADL spokesperson replied, \u201cOur letter speaks for itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The arithmetic of the ADL\u2019s priorities has never been more legible. When Trump held a 2024 rally at Madison Square Garden featuring racist and antisemitic speeches, the ADL issued a statement that did not name Trump, did not name the Republican Party, and did not quote any of the offensive language. In the days following reports that Trump\u2019s generals described him as \u201ca fascist to the core\u201d who spoke admiringly of Hitler, Greenblatt issued eight Twitter posts condemning undergraduate campus organizations. Zero about Hitler. Even former ADL director Abe Foxman publicly rebuked his successor: \u201cHe went after this guy on CNN yesterday and couldn\u2019t mention Trump. It\u2019s a little bizarre.\u201d Foxman had condemned Trump\u2019s MSG rally in Holocaust terms: \u201cThe gas chambers in Auschwitz did not begin with bricks; they began with words.\u201d The ADL said nothing comparable.<\/p>\n

When Elon Musk performed what was clearly a Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration celebration, the ADL told the public to \u201ctake a breath\u201d\u2014while through its partner JLens, it had started an ETF accepting investments in Tesla, Meta, and Amazon in a purported bid to exert influence over these companies\u2019 speech policies. A man who amplified the Great Replacement Theory\u2014the same ideology that motivated the Tree of Life shooter\u2014received the charitable interpretation no college student carrying a Palestinian flag would ever receive.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most revealing moment came in January 2025, when Greenblatt addressed the Israeli Knesset and invoked Israel\u2019s covert pager-bomb campaign against Hezbollah\u2014a mass casualty operation that killed dozens and wounded thousands of Lebanese civilians\u2014as a model for fighting antisemitism online. \u201cWe need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold Pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle,\u201d he said. He was no longer pretending the ADL was a civil rights organization. He was asking to be understood as a combatant.<\/p>\n

The structural gutting followed: The ADL\u2019s flagship civil rights program, No Place for Hate, shuttered; 22 employees were laid off in June 2025 with cuts explicitly framed as a retreat from civil rights work; and in October 2025, the \u201cProtect Civil Rights\u201d section was removed from the ADL\u2019s website entirely. The deleted passage had read, \u201cOur founders established ADL with the clear understanding that the fight against any one form of prejudice or hate cannot succeed without countering hate of all forms.\u201d An ADL spokesperson described the removal as \u201cdeferred maintenance\u201d\u2014as though the founding principle of an institution were a leaky faucet someone had been meaning to get around to.<\/p>\n

Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran.\u00a0This included an attack on a girls\u2019 school in southern Iran, which killed more than 175 people.\u00a0<\/span>The Brennan Center called the strikes \u201cflatly unconstitutional.\u201d Every major Jewish establishment group, save the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, issued statements of support. Just 21 percent of Americans favor the war. On a conference call, Greenblatt declared, \u201cWhat we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the demise of the Islamic Republic makes this a safer world.\u201d By Tuesday, the ADL was posting that slain Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei was a modern-day Haman. Solidarity with dead schoolgirls on Monday, Purim memes on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

When pressed on the perception that Israel had driven the decision, Greenblatt deployed the ADL\u2019s perfected closed loop: anyone focusing on Israel\u2019s role was simply revealing their antisemitism. Here lies the deepest irony: blaming Israel is often antisemitic\u2014it enacts the ancient trope of the scheming Jew pulling strings behind the curtain of gentile power. But the ADL has no standing to make that argument. It has spent years insisting that American Jewish interests and Israeli state interests are identical, that criticism of one was hatred of the other. You cannot fuse a community\u2019s identity to a state\u2019s foreign policy and then cry foul when people blame that community for the state\u2019s wars. The ADL built the conflation. The antisemites merely accepted it.<\/p>\n

Tucker Carlson, for instance, explicitly stated that the conflict \u201chappened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel\u2019s war. This is not the United States\u2019 war.\u201d Marjorie Taylor Greene echoed this sentiment, arguing, \u201cMake America Great Again was supposed to be America first, not Israel first, not any foreign country first,\u201d and implying that U.S. involvement was driven by Israel\u2019s agenda. Even as Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio justified U.S. participation as a defensive measure, they underscored Israel\u2019s determination to act \u201cwith or without American support,\u201d portraying Israel as the primary instigator whose actions necessitated a U.S. response. A<\/span>\u00a0new poll by Zeteo found that 46% of Americans believe Donald Trump is more responsive to Israel than to the American people, with that number rising to 50% among independents. This significant public sentiment reinforces the dynamic where American Jews, deliberately conflated with the Israeli state by the ADL, are positioned as an influential group whose perceived loyalty lies elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The consequences arrived almost immediately. On March 8, two Israeli-American men were hospitalized in San Jose after being attacked outside a restaurant while speaking Hebrew. Their assailants shouted, \u201cDon\u2019t mess with Iran\u201d and \u201cFuck the Jews.\u201d Nobody intervened. (Update: Shortly after this article\u2019s publication, an active shooter event was reported at a Detroit-area synagogue.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation received over 100 complaints from service members reporting that commanders had described the Iran war as part of God\u2019s plan for Armageddon. This is the coalition the ADL has chosen: Christian nationalists who love Israel because they believe it will trigger the apocalypse, at which point Jews who don\u2019t convert will be damned. These are the allies it embraces while calling Jewish Voice for Peace a hate group.<\/p>\n

The ADL now faces bipartisan delegitimization: sixty Muslim, Arab, and allied organizations have called for Greenblatt\u2019s firing; New York Times columnist Bret Stephens\u2014with Greenblatt in the audience\u2014said he would \u201cdismantle\u201d the ADL; and board member Stephen Ludwig resigned, quoting Greenblatt\u2019s own book on authoritarianism back at him: \u201cNot only could it happen here, Jonathan, it is happening here. Read your damn book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The men beaten unconscious in San Jose did nothing wrong. They were not agents of the Israeli government. They were waiting for a table at a restaurant. But the institutions that claim to speak for them had spent years ensuring that in the American imagination, there would be no daylight between ordinary Jewish life and the bombs falling on Tehran. The ADL had burned every bridge to every community that might have stood with them and called the arson \u201cadvocacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ADL did not fall. It chose, step by step, concession by concession, silence by silence, to become what it is: a lobby that speaks the language of victimhood while serving the interests of power. The record is not ambiguous. The pattern is not accidental. And the cost is measured in the safety of the people the ADL was founded to protect\u2014people who are now, thanks to the institution that claims to speak for them, more exposed and more alone than at any point since the Shoah.<\/p>\n

____
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